Cummer Resources

The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens is committed to engage and inspire through the arts, gardens and education. A permanent collection of nearly 5,000 works of art on a riverfront campus offers more than 95,000 annual visitors a truly unique experience on the First Coast. Nationally recognized education programs serve adults and children of all abilities.

As part of a community partnership, the Museum will be hosting students from the Douglas Anderson School of the Arts for their Senior’s Creative Writing: Reading Night, 4 times this year. As a port of the partnership, we would like to share some of the student’s work with the community.

Paperbound Conversation

Written by Ian Burr, Student at Douglas Anderson School of the Arts

The problem is this.

You called yourself poet once,
But fell silent, voice stolen straight from the box
By ancient, thinking thieves
With quills quicker than your Bic.

You and I
Know rules are broken things,
Shackles on odd imaginations
That chain claustrophobia
Around the ecstasies of vertigo.
These irons will not release
Until you learn to bleed steel.

Speak now, poet,
Wordsmith in shining armor.

Attack.
Your words are swords
To slash and hack,
Subtracting abstraction from facts
In fictions, forging your tact
With proper diction, a doctor’s precision,
A scored prescription for your addiction
To exploring past the dictionary,
Straying to say the imaginary, to
Play visionary for merry fairies
That ferry thoughts like
Birds would berries, words to carry on
Until you are understood,
A rocky slate in organic wood,

Because sticks and stones
Are powerless next to a turn of the phrase,
And when you fall in an empty forest,
A sonic boom shellshocks the world for a day.

A poet’s work is like a kiss
Lost in glossed hypothesis.
The problem is
You believe this.